From day one I’ve said how great the DualSense is and the potential the controller may have in the future. While Astro’s Playroom offered a great demo of the capabilities, it wasn’t until Returnal that the DualSense delivered. Now, according to The Last of Us Part II co-director Kurt Margenau, there is potential in elevating how older games use the functionality of the DualSense.
As many of you are jumping back into TLOU2 on PS5, you may notice the haptics feel better. This is actually thanks to a firmware update to the DualSense controller back in April. THREAD: pic.twitter.com/zle0XQwDw6
— Kurt Margenau (@kurtmargenau) May 21, 2021
“As many of you are jumping back into TLOU2 on PS5, you may notice the haptics feel better,” Margenau says on Twitter. In an update that released in April, the controller was updated to work with Naughty Dog’s latest game which recently was given a performance update on PlayStation 5.
Margenau says he spent time talking to the DualSense team offering feedback to improve the timing, intensity, and what he calls ‘texture’ of haptics in backwards compatibility mode. All of this was done so the game felt as it originally intended with the DualShock 4 controller.
Everything is in how the controller was internally designed, Margenau goes on to explain that the DualShock 4 has two different-sized rotating weights inside while the DualSense has two weights that move forward and back, and can express frequency and amplitude at high fidelity with low latency. Basically, the signal sent from the game to the controller makes it believe it is the DualShock 4, emulating the same feedback you would have if you used the DualShock 4.
We’re only six months into the current console generation so I’m excited to see what the developers can do with the right support. So far, there is only one complaint I have about the DualSense and that is the buttons feel mushy and unappealing when pressed.
